everlastingNow

as market needs continue to shift, agency models and service offerings are sliding around as well. when they move without purposeful intention the offering as a whole risks becoming muddied, delivering bad services, missed expectations or worse. i was heartened to see an excellent example of an entirely new-style engagement effort on Wendy Piersall’s blog. it’s a case study of  Kmart’s effective holiday campaign through influencer marketing (thanks to Christine Mortensen for giving me the heads-up, too!).

the post does an excellent job summarizing the effectiveness and likely reasons for success. the campaign worked from a blogging base, transcended ’social media’ channels like facebook and twitter, but integrated them into the conversation with the target audience (mom’s and other frugal shoppers). this entirely new offering originates out of IZEA, which calls itself a ’social media marketing’ company.

there appear to be two flavors of these: 1. Digitally-Progressive PR companies, or 2. Communication-Rich Interactive companies. traditional PR companies are struggling to create the right digital tools to meet the delivery and tracking requirements of digital communications. interactive companies are struggling to create meaningful content that is more than one message or blast and remains on editorial strategy for a prolonged duration. the right place to be, and the one our clients need us to fill, is as usual right there in the middle.

for our own part, creating a meaningful offering includes the development of a content service that behaves like a moderately robust PR agency without pretending to be a full-on PR service. whichever direction you’re headed, be aware when you’re backsliding into someone else’s business model. then consider reaching out and sharing details on the models converging. you might find a partnership or new perspective that completely changes what you both are doing. i know i am…

we’re building a content-agency offering. not a PR model, but more of an out-sourced publishing model for our clients. a for-hire reporting pool that follows editorial guidance (or develops in when appropriate). haven’t found anything like it out there yet and our clients are responding strongly to it already.